Am I Right?

Are there too many specialists now? (I'm guessing not.)

But still, the law of labor supply and demand would draw more would be specialists into primary care given Concierge level compensation. That would take care of part of the shortage in and of itself.

Of course if there is an insufficient number of doctors in aggregate, then swapping specialists into primary care would just be robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Plenty of engineers and Ph.D. scientists are pounding the pavements because their jobs have been outsourced to Asia. Many of those could be cross trained into medicine.

Maybe the government should set up medical academies under the military academy model. I.e., Academy medical students would be trained for free and then have to serve at certain number of years as primary care physicians while being paid a government salary.

Eight regional medical academies educating 1,000 students a year would pump an additional 8,000 docs annually into the primary care system. (BTW, maybe end the current perpetual Wars to Nowhere and use the money to pay for this.)

When push comes to shove though, it seems that physicians will seek to limit their numbers to keep their compensation high. By claiming that physician quality would be severely impacted with increased enrollment. In a tanked economy with so many intellectually qualified people under or unemployed, of course that's a bogus argument.

But yeah, there would be all kinds of resistance from their interest groups to limit a meaningful expansion of the number of physicians trained per year. Only it will all come down to money.